"The Break"

Katie Sise is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Open House and We Were Mothers. Her novels have been included on best-of lists by Good Morning America, the New York Post, E! Online, PureWow, POPSUGAR, and Parade magazine. She is also a jewelry designer and television host and has written several young adult novels, including The Academy, The Pretty App, and The Boyfriend App, as well as the career guide Creative Girl. She lives with her family outside New York City.

Sise applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Break, and reported the following:

“Diaper needs to come off, too,” the nurse says.

So starts page 69 of The Break, and what should be a mundane doctor’s visit encapsulates the entire mood and feeling of the novel. My main character, Rowan, is frozen with the feeling that she’s doing everything wrong, and that something is not quite right with her new family: her husband and her beautiful newborn Lila. Rowan starts page 69 by second-guessing what she’s even supposed to do with the clean diaper now that it’s no longer on her baby’s bottom. Should she throw it away? Is that what other mothers would do? Would it be strange to reuse a diaper, even if clean? She looks to her husband, who avoids her gaze.

When Rowan’s newborn Lila starts crying on the cold metal scale, Rowan is desperate to soothe her, and it feels like an eternity before she’s allowed to pick her back up again. Rowan’s maternal instinct and the intense feeling of wanting to protect her daughter infiltrates the novel, and you can feel it up close and personal on page 69 during the doctor’s visit.

When the nurse leaves, Rowan wonders what the woman thought of her and her husband. Rowan thinks to herself: Maybe she just saw new parents trying to get it right, or maybe she saw something worse.

The Break plays with the idea that the way others see us is sometimes very different than the way we imagine they do. Often, we suspect the worse. And Rowan’s paranoia over trying to get everything right has her second-guessing herself as a new mother. She often wonders where the strong, confident mystery writer version of herself has gone.

While they wait for the doctor to arrive, Rowan’s husband Gabe senses her anxiety and asks if she’s okay. Rowan tries to explain that’s feeling nervous, and when Gabe presses her, asking her why she’s feeling that way, Rowan responds, “I haven’t really stopped feeling nervous since Lila’s been born.”

“But Lila’s fine,” Gabe replies. “Are you nervous about something else?” Rowan confesses that she worries that Lila isn’t really fine, or that she’s going to do something wrong, but Gabe doesn’t understand. They argue, and Rowan accuses him of not being able to understand what it’s like for her as a new mom in charge of this tiny being whom she (and Gabe) love so desperately.

This ever-present feeling of something being not quite right is Rowan’s new reality. She can’t shake the feeling of dread. And she can’t parcel whether that’s because she’s a new mother with a tiny baby she loves and wants to protect, or if it’s something darker. At this point in the novel, Lila’s babysitter June has disappeared, and Rowan is terrified that something terrible has happened to her. Page 69 is a true representation of the dark thoughts, questions, and paranoia inside Rowan as she tries to navigate her new reality as a new mom, and as she wades through tension in her marriage and tries to get to the bottom of what really happened to her babysitter.

Visit Katie Sise's website.

--Marshal Zeringue